"It Seemed Wicked to Have So Much Loveliness and Not Share It"
How Alberta Sturges, the American dollar princess who became Countess of Sandwich, turned a vast and freezing English house into a home, in her own words.
When an American heiress marries into an English family that comes with a house the size of a small village, you might picture her days spent gliding through cold state rooms, admiring the ancestors on the walls. Alberta Sturges had other ideas entirely.
Across a bundle of her letters home to her mother in America, written from Hinchingbrooke in the last spring of the Great War and the years just after, one quiet project runs beneath everything else. It is the turning of an enormous, echoing, inherited pile into somewhere warm. Warm in the plainest sense, which as we shall see was no small battle, and warm in every other way besides.
A Thought in the Garden
The impulse announced itself early. In May of 1918, with the war still grinding on, Alberta sat out in the garden and had a thought that rather shames the rest of us.
“George and I are thinking of lending Hinchingbrooke to the Red Cross as a hospital... yesterday sitting in the garden it seemed wicked to have so much loveliness and not share it.”
There it is, the whole of her character in a single line. The beauty of the place did not make Alberta possessive. It made her generous. Where another chatelaine might have pulled the great house closer around herself, she looked at all that loveliness and felt almost guilty keeping it to one family.
When peace came, and came suddenly, she wrote to her aunt Tantine with her mind already made up.
“Peace coming so suddenly has altered our life again... our job is at Hinchingbrooke very steadily for a few years.”
And then the line I keep returning to: “If I can just get my strength back I will make as bonny a home maker as there is.” A countess, in a house of centuries and servants, quietly naming her ambition as homemaking.
Hot Water Like the Ritz
But a home has to be livable, and Hinchingbrooke, like most great houses, was perishing cold and a good century behind the times. Alberta threw herself at the problem with the glee of a woman who dearly loved a project. First came the plumbing, reported to her mother in the triumphant tones of a general after a hard-won field.
“Our bath system is now perfect and it has boiling water like the Ritz... bath water in 30 seconds.”
Then the great campaign for central heating, which she waged with all the strategic patience it deserved.
“I think we must embark this winter on the central heating to make this home comfy. George longs to settle in to it and not go to London or away every winter, and as it is, it is too cold.”
She even took on the ancestors, bringing in the specialist who cleaned for the National Portrait Gallery to lift a hundred years of grime from the family portraits. They “haven’t been touched for 100 years,” she marvelled, and now looked “so much more alive and brilliant than formerly.” Naturally, she stood and watched him work. “I have been learning,” she wrote, and of course she was. Alberta was always learning.
But warming the house was only ever half of it. What she did next opened its doors to the whole town, and left me with the funniest, most disarming line in the entire bundle.
